TBobjectBox® - Object Code Verification Solutions for DO-178B/C

An ever increasing reliance upon software control has meant that many more applications are becoming safety critical. Consequently, many companies without a traditional requirement for sophisticated software analysis now find themselves compelled to undertake safety-critical or safety-related testing.

“…The requirements-based tests cases may not have completely exercised the code structure, including interfaces, so additional structural coverage analysis is performed and additional verification produced to provide structural coverage”

“Structural coverage analysis may be performed on the Source Code, Object Code or Executable Object Code. Independent of the code form on which the structural coverage analysis is performed, if the software level is A and a compiler, linker or other means generates additional code that is not directly traceable to Source Code statements, then additional verification should be performed to establish the correctness of such generated code sequences.”

So – if

the software is of level A, and

there is additional code that is not traceable to source code, and

requirements-based test cases have not completely exercised that additional code

The inherent one-to-one relationship between statements in the compiler-generated intermediate assembler source code and subsequent object code means that an approach which validates the relationship between the application source code and this assembler code may be used to satisfy this OCV requirement.